I Was Part Of A Research Expedition Which Ventured Into The Jungles of Africa. Only Two Of Us Returned Alive.
My name is Doctor Benjamin Kelly and I’m a 31 year old Professor of Primatology at the University of Manchester in northern England. Late last year, my colleagues and I traveled to Africa on a research assignment to a place called Western Kigoma, a wild area of Tanzania that is home to a number of Chimpanzee communities. We went in search of study and enlightenment, but all we found in the deep, dark jungles of Africa was fear, horror and death. All but two of our research team lost their lives in ways almost too horrific to recall. I wish I could forget the blind terror we experienced there, every day I try to come to terms with the ghastly things we heard and saw, but I cannot. So instead, I will tell you. Gombe National Park is accessible only by boat. Sandwiched between a range of steep, mountainous terrain and the gargantuan, blue waters of Lake Tanganyika, the Park’s geographical isolation has led to an interesting development in the flora and fauna. It is the effects of these developments on the thriving Chimp population that our small research team set out to study, loading our belongings onto a small fishing vessel as the rising African sun turned the dawn sky a shade of blood-orange. We sailed north for a few hours before we finally laid eyes on Gombe itself, the towering mountain crescent surrounding an area of dense, green vegetation. Landing on the shore there, unloading our gear onto the golden sands, it felt like something out of a Jurassic Park movie. The unfamiliar songs of strange, tropical birds emanated from the jungle, merging with the gentle lapping of water against the shoreline. The verdure looked virtually impenetrable, yet this was to be our home for more than a months. The sense of adventure was palpable, for some of us this would be the crowning moment in our academic careers. It wasn’t long before we met the Chimps. Through the thick, lush green of the rainforest, we heard them before we saw them. High pitches screeches and deep, guttural hoots echoed off the dense canopy, yet we never saw one clearly. They darted among the treetops, a rustle of branches and leaves the only thing that gave away their positions. They were like ghosts. Then, after an hour of exhausting walking through the sweltering jungle, they were suddenly right in front of us. An entire Chimpanzee community of around thirty individuals was spread out before the team, playing, grooming and grazing on fruit and insects. Despite many years of academic toil, I had never actually been this close to a community of wild Chimps before. It almost brought me to tears. My first close encounter was with a Chimp that our Tanzanian guides had named Farida. She was younger and a great deal more curious than the others in her group, so I was not entirely surprised when she ambled up to me as I was having lunch. She studied me for a moment, sniffing the air and eyeing up the fruit and nut cereal bar I was eating, she then pouted, gently rocking back and forth among the fallen leaves. Chimps use body language to communicate. Farida’s pout meant she was asking me for some of my food, she was asking me to share. My heart was almost in my throat by the time I had broken off a small piece and held it out for her to take. This was a dream come true. She took the piece of food, softly hooting a kind of thankyou as she began to ate. We were building a relationship with the community, they were beginning to trust us. The trip was going well, but a huge roadblock in our assessments of the community was the reluctance of the Alpha Male to accept us. His name was named Akinda. Akinda looked different to the rest of the Chimps. Instead of the usual jet black uniformity, the hair on Akinda’s body was almost steel-grey. He was brawny and balding with a white muzzle, his body hair missing in patches that revealed deep scarring, evidence of the countless and fruitless occasions in which his leadership was contested. But it was the alpha’s eyes that made the real impression on me, most Chimps’ eye colour ranges from a light, golden brown to a deep, muddy ochre. But Akinda’s were an almost fiery orange that seemed to glow from his orbital sockets. When he looked at you, you felt it. It was about a week into our research assignment that things began to turn sour. One of the Chimps became suddenly and fatally ill, our guides suspected that it’d eaten something poisonous or been bitten by a particularly nasty insect. It was never clear just what killed the poor thing, but thing became worryingly clear. Akinda blamed us. One by one, the small group of Chimps that interacted with us regularly began to shy away from us. A group of males began to almost patrol near us, venturing back and forth to make aggressive displays designed to keep us at bay. Akinda always watched from a distance, his fiery, incandescent eyes glaring at us as he watched our every move. He wanted to make one thing clear. We were no longer welcome. Then, early one morning, one of the guides rushed into our camp, breathlessly commanding us to follow him. By the time we had rushed through the bush towards the Chimps, they were already screeching at screaming with an intensity and volume that hurt my ears and had the hair on the back of my neck standing up. Akinda was circling a smaller male Chimp, glaring at it with his long, sharp canine teeth bared. In the smaller Chimp’s hand was a piece of my cereal bar, a piece I had given to the him just before we had headed back to camp the previous evening. Silently, we watched in horror as the huge, powerful Alpha leapt onto the terrified, smaller Chimp, clasping his hands around the lesser thing’s skull. It struggled and thrashed, but it was useless, Akinda’s huge muscles flexed and we heard the sickening crack as he crushed the smaller Chimp’s skull in his grip. Blood and brains seeped through the cracks in his huge, black fingers as they trembled with raw, animalistic strength. The Chimps screaming somehow grew even louder as the entire community seemed to lose their collective minds. Some looked visibly distraught, tearing at the hair on their bodies and holding their heads in their hands, while others seemed to celebrate the murder, encouraging Akinda by throwing their arms around him in a gesture of submission. Akinda shrugged off the affection, pounding his fists onto the small piece of cereal bar, taking out all the rage and contempt he seemed to feel for outsiders, for humans. Suddenly, Farida came dashing through the bushes to me, her mouth hanging agape in a primate display of fear. Yet her eyes were so full of fear and distress that it required no inter-species translation. Run, they seemed to beg us, run for your lives. But then, the rest of the community had noticed us hiding in the foliage. The younger males that were loyal to Akinda began to confront us, howling and pounding their fists against the jungle floor in displays of raw aggression that leave me shuddering to recall. I remember the fear in Farida’s golden brown eyes. Run, run FAST. And run we did. We raced through the jungle, pursued relentlessly by Akinda’s loyal followers. But they were faster than us, more agile than us; we were clumsy, we were afraid and we were far, far from home. We didn’t stand a fucking chance. Out of around ten team members, I found myself running with a group of three, one of which was a portly researcher from Boston. I will never, ever forget his screams as the Chimps descended on him. One seemed to dive onto him from out of nowhere, a perfectly timed display of violent athleticism that sent our colleague crashing into the dirt and fallen leaves with a grunt. Two more Chimps materialized from the thick jungle flora, pouncing on our downed team member with terrifying speed. Predators seek to kill quickly and efficiently, but these Chimps were not hunting for food, they did not wish to kill efficiently. They wanted only to inflict pain; they craved only vengeance for our supposed transgressions. They sought to punish us. The Chimps began by breaking our colleague’s fingers, taking them in their strong, calloused hands before snapping them like little twigs. They tugged at the bloody, broken digits, twisting them free and leaving nothing but ragged stumps of bone that leaked fresh blood onto the jungle floor. One Chimp set about gouging out our colleague’s eyes, we knew this not because we could see it in any intimate detail, he was lost in a mass of black fur and flailing limbs, but because his screams made us aware. “My Eyes! No, please, not my eyes! Oh God they’re – NO – uuuaaaAAAARRRGGGH!” Mid-scream, one of the Chimps had taken a grip of the man’s jaw, ripping it free from his skull after a moment of bone grinding, sinew severing agony. It made his cries sound choked, inhuman. His cries subsided as he began to drown in his own blood. The last thing I saw before we began to run again was the sight of a Chimp ripping away the man’s trousers, tearing them open, gripping his genitals before pulling, ripping, rending. They were eating him. We tore past our encampment, ignoring thousands of pounds worth of expensive research equipment, wildly sprinting for the beach, for the boat, for our chance to escape. When we broke through the tree line and onto the beach, there was already a figure on the boat. They must have heard the commotion through the jungle, seen us running and figured it was time to go. I remember thanking God for a moment, a second or two of pure divine thankfulness that something had gone right in the middle of all this madness. But as we got closer, and the hunched figure reared up and turned to us, I felt sick with terror. It was Akinda. His grey muzzle stained crimson with the blood of a dead Tanzanian, lying broken and lifeless on the deck of the boat. His orange eyes burned with violent delight at the sight of us as he threw the chunk of brown flesh he was gorging on with a wet thunk. He screeched victoriously, sensing our exhaustion, smelling our ripe fear in the air. It seems to strange to think about it now, but I remember feeling a sense of bizarre clarity in those moments. It was all so simple, Akinda was everything, he was God and the Devil, through blood and pain he had crowned himself King, he had tasted power and he had grown mad with it. It was all so easy to understand, so very human. I stood still, sweating and panting, rooted to the warm, golden sand, and waited to die. Akinda leapt from the boat, hitting the sand at a bound as he hurtled up the beach toward me. I cannot understate how weak and soft it makes you feel, seeing a creature so closely related us display capabilities so much further advanced than our own. His agility and strength were as awe inspiring as they were horrifying, I felt helpless, Akinda was about to tear my weak, hairless body apart and there was nothing I could do about. It happened in an instant. Something in peripheral vision, a blur of black fur, crashed into Akinda and sent him flying off course. I was stunned; well and truly, I had accepted my impending death so completely and utterly that I simply could not bring myself to run to the boat and secure my salvation. I just stared in amazement as a younger Chimp faced off against the alpha of the troop, a young, gentle female that now furiously screeching as she bared her teeth to Akinda. It was Farida. She shot me a momentary glance as she kept Akinda at bay, a look in her eyes that I had seen just a short while ago. Run, run or die! Akinda beat his fists against the sand in pure, primal fury; he could not allow this display of insolence to go unpunished. We made a dash for the boat, my only surviving colleague diving on board to start to engine as I struggled to push the small craft into the open water. I could hear the battle ensuing behind me, Akinda’s apoplectic roars almost drowning out the higher pitched screams of our savior, Farida. My eyes began to tear up with the siege of emotion as the boat finally began to free itself from the sand, floating freely on the waters of the lake. At last, I heaved myself from the cool, crystal waters and rolled roughly into the boat, before pulling myself up onto my hands and knees just in time to catch one last glance of the Gombe shoreline. Akinda stood over the shattered body of Farida, her chest rising and falling as she lay defeated in the sand. She turned her head towards us and I swear we made a brief moment of eye contact as her attacker towered above her broken body. Thank you, I said softly, my words lost to the sound of the boat’s roaring propeller. Akinda brought his fists down on Farida’s head with catastrophic force, I couldn’t watch. I spent the next three months on paid leave from the University before I finally went back to work. Even then, it took a me while to be able to look at a Chimpanzee without breaking out in a cold sweat and having to politely excuse myself. If it wasn’t for Farida, I’m not sure I would ever be able to look at one again. The trip to Tanzania was a failure and a tragic loss of life, but it was not without it’s lessons. Mankind tries to separate itself from the natural world, to place itself above and apart from the beasts than roam upon the earth. But the more it tries to separate itself, the more obvious it is that we are still just animals, with all the brutality and beastliness that comes with it. Suspicion, envy, tribalism and war. We saw them all in the Chimps of Kigoma, for we were them once, and in time, we may become them again. Category:Fanfic Category:Creepypasta